The exposure of children to inappropriate material on television, such as sexual content, violence, coarse language, and so forth, has long been a concern. Recent technological developments now allow parents and other responsible individuals to control what children may see on television and to view a log of programming that has been previously viewed. For example, access to programming may be controlled by a user (e.g. a parent) based on certain program characteristics, such as program titles, ratings, times, or channels. In such systems, programming may be blocked and unblocked by entering a parental control code in a set top terminal through which the programming is received. This can be a cumbersome process, especially if the user desires to block channels on a room-by-room basis in residences where there are multiple televisions each with their own set top terminal. In this case each set top terminal needs to be separately programmed to prevent or limit access to certain program content.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide a simplified arrangement for limiting access to programming and for acquiring a log of previously viewed programming which is easy for the end user to configure, regardless of the number of set top terminals that may be present in the residence.